SYNOPSIS

With some reluctance, US Army Major Reisman takes on the job of training a dozen convicted violent criminals for a suicide mission behind enemy lines. Reisman works against the wildly disruptive and erratic behavior of the men in his charge to whip them into excellent condition to first humiliate American troops in a mock battle and then to carry out their brutal assignment, the mass assassination of German officers at a chateau in France.

Director: Robert Aldrich

Producer: Kenneth Hyman

Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson, Lukas Heller

Cinematography: Edward Scaife

Editing: Michael Luciano

Art Direction: W.E. Hutchinson

Original Music: Frank De Vol
Cast: Lee Marvin (Major Reisman), Ernest Borgnine (General Worden), Charles Bronson (Joseph Wladislaw), Jim Brown (Robert Jefferson), John Cassavetes (Victor Franko), Robert Ryan (Col. Breed), Telly Savalas (Archer Maggott)

Why THE DIRTY DOZEN is Essential

Judging by the audiences who cheered for its rousing World War II action and explosive, over-the-top heroics, The Dirty Dozen could hardly be called an anti-war movie, not in the sense of others of its time, such as M.A.S.H. (1970). On the other hand, the anti-authoritarian, anti-military attitude on display in the picture, so characteristic of this period (in the thick of the war in Vietnam), mark the film as vastly different from John Wayne's gung-ho The Green Berets (1968). This story of condemned criminals pressed into the service of a sneak attack against German high command pulled off the neat trick of appealing to all sides of a nation increasingly divided over the controversial military conflict in Southeast Asia, becoming one of the biggest hits of the year and continuing to appear on many people's favorites lists.

At the time of its release, however, not everyone was cheering. Many reviewers objected to the picture's "deleterious" viewpoint and excessive violence, characterized by one critic as "criminal and psychopathic forms of sadism." Director Robert Aldrich, with a screenplay based on a true story and a cast of both macho action players and respected actors, took to the extreme the standard war movie cliché of a squad from disparate backgrounds thrown together for an impossible mission. The heroes here range from the merely criminal to the fully unhinged, promised clemency for their misdeeds by a military command heedless of their safety and any ethical/moral concerns. Aldrich objected to the criticism by insisting he wanted to show how all sides in a war do despicable things, but the New York Times' Bosley Crowther echoed the sentiments of many who said the film's ability to have it both ways pointed to an easy cynicism whose clear intent was "just to delight and stimulate the easily moved."

However you take the intent and effect of The Dirty Dozen, its entertainment value can't be denied, but that alone is not what earns it a place in cinema history. As Gary Sussman of moviefone.com has pointed out, all of the things Crowther and others slammed back in 1967--what they considered its sadistic, antisocial "hooliganism" and excessive violence, its mocking cynicism about authority--are exactly what would make it a hit today. The so-called brutality on display here was just the early stage of a new level of violence creeping into movies as censorship standards and public taste changed. This is one of the key films of the time, along with such bloody dramas as The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967), that shifted the depiction and degree of violence on the screen and changed how we viewed and accepted it. Even more significant, as with those movies, The Dirty Dozen had us rooting for characters who, only a decade or so earlier, would have been the villains of any other movie--criminals, outlaws, sociopaths, people who will never fit into the mainstream even on the very slim chance that they may want to--while the once typical "heroes," i.e., the military authority (with the exception of Lee Marvin's sympathetic major), are shown to be stupid, delusional, and generally contemptible.

As Sussman rightly points out, then, the influence The Dirty Dozen has had on future generations of film has more to do with attitude: "Every anti-authoritarian action hero (from another 'Dirty' guy, Clint Eastwood's once-controversial Dirty Harry, to Bruce Willis' John McClane, to Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo, to Christian Bale's public-opinion-be-damned Dark Knight), every indiscriminate slaughterer we're expected to identify with (from Bronson's vigilante heroes to take-your-pick from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, or Jason Statham), every lawman who bitterly grinds his badge into the dust, every crimefighter who must become as monstrous as the brutes he pursues, every warrior who expects our admiration for his willingness to shoot first and ask questions later--all of them owe a debt to The Dirty Dozen and the challenge it offered us, to see something admirable and even noble in antisocial violence channeled in the right direction."

It also didn't hurt, during the Vietnam years, that it put forth the idea that war is not merely hell, it's insane; it's not noble, it's dirty. We may never engage in another "popular" war as we did in the 1940s. Our enemies are not always as easy to identify or pigeonhole as before, and our motives may no longer read quite so pure and honorable as they did then. The Dirty Dozen didn't create that cynicism or destroy our faith in those who purport to lead us, but it certainly tapped into a growing sentiment in the air, and it helped to define a type of action movie that, for better or worse, audiences still flock to.

By Rob Nixon